Great Glacial Lakes

Amazingly, an ancient remote sensing satellite has been recovered, encased in permafrost, during an archaeological dig in a still-undisclosed location. The 10-20 thousand year old imaging technology was reverse-engineered and scientists have been able to extract the imagery from the device. Among the imagery they found this shot of what is now the Great Lakes area, still encased in glacial ice with deep aquamarine pools of meltwater where our current lakes now lie. Behold…

Actually, on a whim yesterday I made a bathymetric map of the Great Lakes with my favorite water-depth hack. I was told by a reader, Jared, that some land hillshade would add some visual interest. I agreed. Also in the back of my mind was a series of tweets from Tim Wallace showing ice-encased lake imagery…

So I added in an overlay hillshade later and draped it over my whole map. I gave it a blue-tinted bumpified color scheme so the lakes wouldn’t be occluded, and POW! A map of the Great Lakes as ephemoral meltwater pools in a glacial ice-scape.